Like why do they care how many times I go to porn hub every day or that nothing gets me harder than a free use MILF? Why do they care that I don’t know how to spell consistency so I have to Google it every 3 months.
What the fuck is wrong with people?
Money.
Your data can help sell you stuff. If they know you’re into MILFs, they can sell advertising to the MILF companies. Then you see a bunch of MILF ads. The more they know, the more they can target you. Eventually we’ll have ads in our dreams like in Futurama.
Jokes on you, he probably already has MILF dreams!
Upgrade those MILFs to GILFs with this one weird trick!
You know, knowing advertising algorithms, expect a lot of mistakes like that in your dreams, thanks to the users-like-you-also-like thing they do. “Thirsty GILF scatporn near you!”-- the future is bleak.
But golden showers sound so optimistic!
Because your data is used to make models of your behavior and opinions. Once someone knows exactly what you do and don’t like it’s really easy to frame purchase and political decisions so that they sound like something you want, even if they’re really good for someone else.
Do they know I’m basically a monkey with depression? Can someone tell them that? Might answer some of the questions they are so desperate to find out.
I think they’d be more interested in whether you’re a bonobo or a chimp because those imply very different approaches to relieving stress.
This isn’t about you. Your data is key in making other, relevant people stand out. Why relevant? Because they resist. Because they aren’t depressed, they are fighting back. And whatever the reason that drives them, they can be manipulated. By compromising their anonymity. By making literally everyone else a “known variable”. With your help.
they’re interested because they profit from the marketing based on the data
More specifically — by matching all of your purchases with every data point about you, and the people you associate with, they can build out statistical models to determine the data points that most strongly correlate to people like you and what motivates or persuades them to GENERATE MORE PROFIT — direct purchases, attention, clicks, discussion, word of mouth, lead generation, etc, etc…
Or… You know… What motivates/persuades you to support a dictator or vote for a specific political candidate or party, as well as what demotivates/dissuades you from the opposition — including what types of psychological warfare, disinformation, deepfakes, “fake news”, and lies are most successful in achieving these goals — all of which benefits the most horrifically immoral and unethical criminals, corporations, and individuals the most (the “good guys” aren’t the ones using deception and lies to profit and win).
I mean if my grocery store app could track my purchases and then give me a suggested weekly grocery list based on meals it knows I like or ate before that would be incredible. Hell I’d pay for that lol.
To put it succinctly they aren’t. They’re interested in aggregate data so that a data engineer can use it to understand consumer trends and better predict marketing reach.
It’s not specifically about you, it’s more of a what they can claim to know about their consumers.
Pixar seeing a rise in milf web searches: Ok boys it’s time to release another movie with a mom who has a dump truck ass.
Why are tech companies* so interested
$$$
Other companies are willing to pay big money for your data so they can specifically target people who are likely to buy their shit. Also, now the government is buying that data so that they can unconstitutionally keep tabs on every person in the world.
Also political organizations want this data to help them target potential voters more effectively.
The single raindrop never feels responsible for the flood
A spooky thing I noticed at one point I could search a rather vague query and Google was returning results in the programming language I was working with when the query was general enough to have been any language.
Because the last bastion of zombie capitalism is pushing money around.
Folks buy this information because there are other folks willing to buy this information. And so on… and so on…
You know how they use facial recognition to kill people in the middle east? It’s the same idea here.
Cool. Now I can subtly influence you to pay for your free use MILF porn. Or use MILF models in your ads to make you more likely to buy shit.
Even if you don’t think you can be influenced by that stuff it still likely to change your behaviour just enough, even just 5% more spending which makes it worthwhile to them.
But honestly your data barely matters on its own. But once it’s merged with everyone else’s…that’s when it’s valuable.
They are interested in your data because you are human and you do human things, the more they understand you and your activities the better they can gather knowledge for economical decisions such as Ads, Trends etc.
Most commonly they use this information to manipulate you into using their services or changing your preferences by marketing and Ads. The more they understand you the more effective it is.